Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

He has held solo exhibitions including 《Puck, Nocturnal Paintings》 (ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, 2024); 《Ahnnlee Lee’s SAALGOO Bar》 (Drawing Space SAALGOO, Seoul, 2018); 《Yes. Five Mirrors》 (Drawing Space SAALGOO, Seoul, 2016); and a duo exhibition 《Orange Sleep》 (ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Participated in group exhibitions including 《Unboxing Project 3: Maquette》 (New Spring Project, Seoul, 2024); 《How Are you Feeling Today?》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi, 2023); Frieze No.9 Cork Street, London (2023); 《Tinkering with the objects》 (Wumin Art Center, Cheongju 2022); 《2022 Sea & Museum》 (Lee Kang Ha Art Museum, Gwangju, 2022); 《Structures of Gestures》 (ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, 2022); 《Local Network Exchange Exhibition: Same Dreams, Different Places》 (Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeju, 2018); 《The Flirting the Art Archipelago》 (Seongbuk Creation Center, Seoul, 2017) and others.

Originality & Identity

Ahnlee Lee’s practice centers on the intimate observation of natural and non-human entities encountered in daily life. He translates the emotions, transformations, and traces of time formed through these relationships into a painterly language. Early drawing works such as Root and Branch(2009) and Depart I(2011) demonstrate the artist’s perspective on the life cycle of plants—seeds, roots, flowers, and branches—and go beyond mere representation to explore layers of awareness and emotion tied to vitality itself. For Lee, natural objects are not just static forms but living “events” that evoke sensory perception and memory; his works are poetic structures built from these moments.

The artist continues to expand his thematic scope by visualizing emotional responses to non-human beings and inner tremors in more intuitive and playful ways. In the two-person exhibition 《Orange Sleep》(2023, ONE AND J. Gallery), presented with artist Youngjoo Cho, he introduced works inspired by soap, aiming to express the properties and functions of everyday objects through tactile means.

In his solo exhibition 《Puck, Nocturnal Paintings》(2024, ONE AND J. Gallery), Lee casts himself in the role of “Puck”—a character from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and unravels the contradictions and emotional layers embedded in human relationships under the metaphor of “night.” In this way, the artist constructs an affective art practice that elicits universal sensory experiences by focusing on the small and often overlooked moments of everyday life.

Style & Contents

Ahnlee Lee traverses diverse media—painting, drawing, collage, installation, and sculpture—to materialize his sensory encounters. Rather than fixing a subject as a completed image, his work unfolds through a cycle of “observation–resonance–transformation,” becoming a record of perception. For example, the collage series ‘World Domestic Script Office’(2020) juxtaposes object images from the history of human civilization with the artist’s own drawings, invoking both the presence and sensorial impact of objects. The drawing series ‘23 Coincidences’(2020) serves as a diary-like accumulation of sensorial impressions gathered while tending to plants, visualizing an inner narrative through the repetition and sedimentation of small events.

Lee frequently employs materials such as paper, pencil, ink, and sand, which function as conduits for accumulating temporality and tactility through repetitive gestures. In Orange Sleep (2022), he visualizes the tactility of soap—a material that becomes increasingly worn and dirty through use—through a canvas surface marked by coarseness and erosion.

This sensibility continues in new works such as Kiss (2024), Carnival Confetti (2024), and Olive Trip(2024), which combine sculptural intuition with painterly texture. These works involve layering sand, pigment, and acrylic on canvas, then scraping and repainting—a repetitive gesture that echoes the growth and erosion of natural forms. Here, texture becomes a key factor in conveying emotional density.

Topography & Continuity

Ahnlee Lee has developed a unique visual language that combines materiality, gesture, temporality, and narrative, based on emotional responses to small and seemingly insignificant elements such as plants, seeds, birds, soap, and events from dictionaries or classical literature. The precise observation and depiction seen in his early drawing series have gradually expanded into more sensory and poetic paintings and installations through physical actions like repetition, accumulation, scraping, attaching, and weaving. He does not remain bound to a single style or technique, but continuously transforms his visual language using everyday materials, forming his own 'botanical cosmos.'

The artist focuses on transforming the process of relating to non-human entities—such as surrounding flora, fauna, and objects—into art. Going forward, he is expected to continue constructing a distinctive world through an irregular and organic sculptural sensibility.